The darker side of New York, which Victorian writers would render as dirty and ugly as Dickensian London, becomes softer and more vague in Fitzgerald’s description: ‘[A] fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.’ (27)
The image, although of the underbelly of society, is still oddly beautiful. Fitzgerald creates a fantasy world in which anything is possible, an approach later used by writers ranging from Hemingway and Joseph Conrad to John Barth and Raymond Carver. By removing his narrative from pure reality, Fitzgerald is able to take a more impressionistic approach to New York, effectively making the Eggs and the Valley of Ashes characters in their own right.
In such an unreal setting, the old rules no longer apply; some can be bent, others broken. The Nineteenth century’s insistence on accountability and adherence to moral guidelines in its fiction had begun eroding before Gatsby was written – Fitzgerald completed the process with his portrayal of a world that is less immoral than amoral – less rebelling against moral codes than having no concept of them.
Change was, after all, in the air. Jay Gatsby dies, not as a result of his criminal activities, but from being the wrong place at the wrong time. Myrtle Wilson dies, not from a jealous wife’s rage over her adultery, but from that wife’s drunken incompetence. Tom and Daisy, responsibly for both deaths, simply leave the Eggs – Nick’s later meeting with Tom suggests they have no remorse. Jordan drifts away, never revealed as a cheater on the pro tour. Only Nick seems to have retained a conscience from their shared Midwestern heritage, but it is tempered by his exposure to Gatsby’s world. ‘One night I did hear a material car [at Gatsby’s house] and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.’ (188) Nick will carry what he has seen at the parties, culminating in the fateful “party” at the Plaza Hotel, with him forever.
Gatsby’s parties themselves set the stage for the amoral activities to follow. Again, the definition is important – nothing immoral seems to go on at the parties in detail. What Fitzgerald gives us is a glamorous sheen of decadence. Note the lack of specific detail in Nick’s account of the aftermath of one party. ‘Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands…One of the men was talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife after attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent way broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks – at intervals she appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond and hissed “You promised!” into his ear.’ (56) All we see of the husband is his “curious intensity,” with no description of what physical form that intensity might take; all we see of the wife is her “angry diamond” attack style, another metaphor for wealth, but no obvious description of drunkenness or any other condition that might have escalated her anger. We see nothing of the actress’s response to any of this. Is she flattered? Sexually interested? Plotting a way to take advantage of any money the man might have? Fitzgerald doesn’t tell us. The scene is portrayed as if it is a normal course of events for the sad, insecure, amoral crowd that parties at Jay Gatsby’s house.
Of course, the party guests are merely sketches compared to the full-blown main characters of the novel – or would “caricatures” be a more appropriate term? Using characters as symbols of human behavior is as old as literature itself, but Nineteenth-century American writers tended toward more individual character studies and deeper character development. “Minimalizing” a step further than Mark Twain, Fitzgerald brings a European allegorical feel to his Gatsby characters, prompting later Modernists from William Faulkner to Philip Roth to do the same.
Fitzgerald’s cross-fertilization of traditionally American and traditionally English elements, specifically in characterization, allows him to distill his characters to their core qualities – Nick the innocent, Gatsby the ambitious, Daisy the beautiful fool, Tom the ruthless capitalist, Jordan the unscrupulous socialite – and to make locations like the Eggs, the Valley of Ashes, even the Eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg into characters in their own right.
Those who criticize Wolfsheim and Gatsby’s father as under-developed characters miss the point; both are merely aspects of Gatsby he leaves behind when he dies. Neither criminal ambition (Wolfsheim) nor pure love (Mr. Gatsby) can die; as a combination of these qualities, all this is lost of Gatsby is the body in which Fitzgerald placed him. This is fitting, considering that Fitzgerald uses his characters to criticize elements of his society that are also deathless.
Open social criticism is another Modernist hallmark Fitzgerald exploits to its fullest in his characters. In the Nineteenth century, essayist and poet Henry David Thoreau advocated Civil Disobedience from jail; Fitzgerald’s response is a near-parody of 1920s American urban life. His world is close enough to the real world to be recognizable, yet it is blurred enough to serve his purposes. All of Gatsby’s characters, human and nonhuman, participate in Modernism’s open examination of such American institutions as industry, power and class and their by-products. Gatsby’s open critique, already in use by poets of the time, is the most blatant yet, beginning an almost century-long tradition of social commentary in American literature.
The Great Gatsby set the tone for literature to come in its blending of various post-nineteenth century ideas into what would become known as Modernism and its offshoot, Postmodernism. Fitzgerald, influenced by the social and artistic changes going on all around him, developed a vision that has persisted into fiction of the twenty-first century; his concerns are our concerns, and American life has changed little from Modern to Postmodern. Only the terms have changed. In defining what fiction could become, Gatsby is as important today as in 1926 as an example of what Modernist literature can, and still does, accomplish.